Outstanding piece by @js, one of the best I’ve read this year.

I work for Ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation.

Outstanding piece by @js, one of the best I’ve read this year. https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0

Some thoughts.

First, what he calls “programmable hardness” I’ve called “programmable scarcity”, as distinct from “programmable information.”

That is, the internet lets you *copy* digital objects easily, but blockchains let you also *transfer* them — by using cryptography to create digital scarcity.

However, “programmable hardness” may be a better phrase. It combines several concepts under one umbrella:

- financially hard, as in hard money 
- computationally hard, as in NP-hard
- legally hard, as in hard commitment 
- practically hard, as in hard to fake

And the visual is “physically hard” as in gold.

His word “cast” is also well chosen, as it relates the physical aspect of hardness to the temporal aspect of future reliability.

- trust the forecast
- cast it in stone
- and cast that stone into the future 

Also, cast as in “cast a vote” (a binding commitment) and “cast a shadow” (a line extending out).

Lol, and also “cast” as in Farcaster!! 🤪

I didn’t even realize that till just now. @dwr.eth did you pick the name with that connotation?

Farcaster: cast a commitment far into the future, like the blockchain.

His analogy between information theory and cryptographic hardness is also excellent.

Of course many have written on this topic, but quantifying the computational *and* financial cost of falsifying something may become as important as calculating how many bits it has.

“Hards” as the new bits?

Finally, the relationship between physical hardness (atoms), social hardness (institutions), and digital hardness (blockchains) is something I’ve also thought about.

Technology reduces scarcity, which means more food. But in doing so it also often erodes institutional certainty, which means more fights.

One answer is to use the hardness of math (cryptography) to restore the hardness of social institutions with blockchains.

I talked about this in the network state book from a different angle, in terms of technical vs political truths.

One answer is to use the hardness of math (cryptography) to restore the hardness of social institutions with blockchains.

I talked about this in the network state book from a different angle, in terms of technical vs political truths.
https://thenetworkstate.com/political-power-and-technological-truth

Bitcoin difficulty is measured by how many hashes you need to solve the next block.

Hashes may be the units of hardness, like bits are the units of information.

Hashes also have a market rate, which can be expressed in USD…or in ounces of gold or BTC itself.

So: hashes measure computational + financial hardness.

A related concept is 33 bits for measuring privacy and anonymity.

2^33 = 8 billion 
And there are about 7 billion humans.
So with 33 bits of information you can figure out which human it is.

Anyway, with information we are now accustomed to talking about it. How many gigabytes is that file? All information is measured in bits.

Can we measure everything in crypto in hashes? Like: how many hashes would it take to falsify that? What’s it’s hardness? Perhaps this is too simple.

Programmable hardness is a generalization of the hard money that is Bitcoin. It pulls in many adjacent words:

- scarcity
- difficulty
- constraint 
- commitment
- immutable
- uncensorable
- fixed
- permanent
- archival
- reliable
- constant
- dependable
- trustworthy
- transparent
- provable
- verifiable